The Genocide of Ottoman Greeks, 1914-1923

I am going to start posting some historical threads. "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it." Indeed we see the same mistakes happening in our time. I was startled that a poster wasn't aware of this genocide.

The Genocide of Ottoman Greeks, 1914-1923

Pontian and Anatolian Greeks were victims of a broader Turkish genocidal project aimed at all Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. A total of more than 3.5 million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal from roughly 1914 to 1923. Of this, as many as 1.5 million Greeks may have died. The end of the genocide marked a profound rupture in the long Greek historical presence on the Asia Minor.

Map courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Greek communities began inhabiting Anatolia (Greek for “east”), otherwise referred to as the Asia Minor, since the 12th century BCE. They centered mostly along the Aegean littoral, although some Greeks, known as Pontians, went further east and colonized the southern shores of the Black Sea. Turkic peoples migrated into Anatolia over the first millennium CE and by the 14th century had established the Ottoman Empire. Over the next six hundred years, the Empire organized its ethnically diverse population into the millet system, thereby ensuring cultural and religious pluralism. Under this system, the Ottoman Greeks, like other Christian communities in the Empire, were provided with a degree of autonomy.

The geographic extent and political power of the Ottoman Empire began to decline over the 19th century as subjected peoples, especially the Greeks, began exerting their own nationalist aspirations. With the support of the Great Powers, the Greeks successfully overthrew Ottoman rule during their War of Independence from 1821 to 1830, thereby establishing the modern Greek state as it is currently situated at the tip of the Balkan Peninsula. However, the over two and a half million ethnic Greeks still living in Anatolia, separated from their Balkan compatriots, suffered the scorn of an increasingly vitriolic Turkish nationalism tainted by a bitter sense of humiliation. The Young Turk movement emerged from this context, eventually aiming to turn the multiethnic Ottoman Empire into a homogenous Turkish nation state. Under the banner of the Committee for the Union of Progress (CUP), this ethnic nationalist movement assumed power after a coup d’état in 1913.

This political revolution occurred in the midst of the Balkan Wars from October 1912 to July 1913, which ultimately ended five centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Afterwards, there was a brief diplomatic effort between the Greeks and the CUP to arrange a population exchange. However, the outbreak of World War I stunted this effort, and instead the CUP took its own radical initiatives. They began singling out all able-bodied Greek men, forcibly conscripting them into labor battalions which performed slave labor for the Turkish war effort. Greek children were stolen and forcibly assimilated into Turkish society. Greek villages were brutally plundered and terrorized under the pretext of internal security. Indeed, as with the Armenians, the Greeks were generally accused as a disloyal and traitorous “fifth-column,” and eventually most of the population was rounded up and forcibly deported to the interior. This modus operadi was more or less the same for all three Christian victim groups.

Greek men in Smyrna guarded by Turkish troops for deportation to the interior (September 1922); courtesy of Greek-Genocide.org

Again with support of the Great Powers, Greece invaded part of Anatolia immediately after the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I. Centered around the Aegean port city of Smyrna (now known by its Turkish name, ?zmir), Greek occupation forces brutally subjected local Turks, thereby further stoking interethnic conflagrations. At the same time, Mustafa Kemal Pasha was leading a Turkish resurgence, eventually dispelling the Greek military from Anatolia. Turkish forces retook Smyrna in September 1922, instigating a massive anti-Greek pogrom. On September 13, a fire broke out amidst the chaos, spreading uncontrollably over the next two weeks. The Smyrna catastrophe took the lives of somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 Greeks. Two months later, diplomatic negotiations between the Kemalist regime and the Great Powers began in Switzerland, leading to the signing of the Treat of Lausanne in February 1923. The sovereign status of a Turkish nation state was thereby affirmed, and the Great Powers essentially condoned the Turkish genocidal project.

The demographic consequences of the Greek genocide are not objectively certain. The prewar population of Greeks was at least 2.5 million. Over the course of 1914 to 1923, about one million had migrated, some voluntarily but most under coercion. As many as 1.5 million Greeks died, either from massacre or exposure, although this figure is not positive. Presently, a miniscule Greek population remains in Turkey. Greek communities annually commemorate the genocide on September 14 in recognition of the Smyrna catastrophe.]

The Second Constitutional Era (Ottoman Turkish: ايکنجى مشروطيت دورى‎; Turkish: İkinci Meşrûtiyyet Devri) of the Ottoman Empire established shortly after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution which forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore the constitutional monarchy by the revival of the Ottoman parliament, the General Assembly of the Ottoman Empire and the restoration of the constitution of 1876. The parliament and the constitution of First Constitutional Era (1876–1878) had been suspended by Abdul Hamid in 1878 after only two years of functioning. Whereas the First Constitutional Era had not allowed for political parties, the Young Turks amended the constitution to strengthen the popularly elected Chamber of Deputies at the expense of the unelected Senate and the Sultan's personal powers, and formed and joined many political parties and groups for the first time in the Empire's history.

A series of elections during this period resulted in the gradual ascendance of the Committee of Union and Progress's (CUP) domination in politics.

500 years of relatively peaceful coexistence under the "despotism" of the sultans: 5 years into democratic "freedom," genocide.

One might draw parallels to post-Hohenzollern Germany and post-colonial India/Pakistan and Africa.

...a lesson there.

"The program of liberalism, ...if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property..."

-Ludwig von Mises

"Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a "diversitarian"; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right."

-Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

"All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

This black page in history is best known as the “Armenian genocide”. From 1915 to 1918 up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians died.
I didn't even know that also a lot of Christians of other origin were massacred. That I write in this post about "Armenians" doesn't mean that I disagree with the Original Post that (also) a large group of Greeks were murdered and forced to leave the Ottoman Empire...

In the 1880's, the Rothschild and Nobel families acquired interests in the Russian oil fields of Baku. By a new railroad they transported the oil through Batumi on the Black Sea (part of the Ottoman Empire, now part of Georgia).
In 1892, Marcus Samuel revolutionised oil transport by beginning to ship it by oil tanker (The Murex) from Batumi, through the Suez Canal to the Far East where Royal Dutch Shell became the predominant supplier of Kerosene almost overnight.
Royal Dutch Petroleum Company joined forces with the Rothschilds in the Asiatic Petroleum Company, before merging in 1907 with Samuel’s Shell Transport and Trading Company into the Royal Dutch Shell Group.
Shell would eventually join Standard Oil and the Nobels in a worldwide oil cartel…

As a ploy to start the revolt, the British supported the idea of a "Greater Armenia" out of Turkey, Iran, and Russia. This "Greater Armenia" had no possibility of existing.
The British also supported the idea of Kurdistan for the Kurds, in the same area where the "Greater Armenia" was supposedly planned.

In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), better known as the Young Turks, carried out a coup, overthrew the sultan, and took power in the Ottoman Turkish empire by 1913 the three-man board of the Young Turks Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal was in charge of the country.
The Young Turks had been freemason in the Scottish Rite. Albert Pike became its grandmaster in 1859.
The Italian Masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been started by a follower of Giuseppe Mazzini, Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of a B'nai B'rith's European affiliate, the Universal Israelite Alliance.
The grandmaster of the Scottish Rite in France, Adolph Cremieux, was one of the founders of the Scottish Rite in Turkey. Cremieux was also the head of the B'nai B'rith's European affiliate. Cremieux had been a leader of Mazzini's Young France, and helped put the British stooge Napoleon III to power.

The Italian B'nai B'rith official Emmanuel Carasso founded the Young Turks in the 1890s in Salonika. Carasso was also the grandmaster of the Italian Masonic lodge "Macedonia Resurrected".
Talaat was the man in charge in Turkey during World War I. He had been a member of "Macedonia Resurrected". One year prior to the 1908 coup, Talaat became the grandmaster of the Scottish Rite Masons in the Ottoman Empire.
Most of the Young Turk leaders were masons of the Scottish Rite.

Shortly after 1905, the associate of Carasso, Alexander Helphand (Parvus), moved to Turkey, where he became the economics editor of the Young Turk newspaper “The Turkish Homeland”.
Parvus became a business partner of Carasso in the grain trade, and an arms supplier to the Turkish army during the Balkan wars.
Parvus also financed the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions.

The Russian Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky arrived in Turkey shortly after the Young Turks seized power, to become editor of the paper “The Young Turk”.
The paper was owned by a member of the Turkish cabinet, but funded by the Russian Zionist federation, and managed by B'nai B'rith.
The editorial policy of the paper was dictated by the Dutch Jacob Kann - personal banker to the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Hendrik.

When a lot of attention was given to the First World War, the Armenian population of Turkey was massacred.
The 25 February 1915 directive accused Armenians of releasing State secrets to Russia.
Armenians were taken from active combat duty in the Turkish army and Armenians were disarmed.
Starting in April 1915, the Armenians were driven out of their villages.
In May 1915, Mehmet Talaat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier legalise the deportation of Armenians.
In January 1916, the Ottoman Minister of Commerce and Agriculture ordered all financial institutions to turn over Armenian assets to the government.

Most Armenians weren’t actively murdered, but died because of starvation and sickness. No shelter was provided, either in cold weather or under the scorching desert sun, and they weren’t given sufficient food and water.
It is estimated that in 1918 up to 1 ½ million (of a total of two million) Armenians had been killed.
Here’s a picture of remains of Armenians at Erzinjan.

Numerous eyewitness accounts of the atrocities were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the atrocities he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire.
In August 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people".
Morgenthau wrote the following text to go with the next photo: "Those who fell by the wayside. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation.”

The Russian Empire responded to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports by a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories from the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1915, brought some relieve to the Armenian bastion in the city of Van.
In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzurum made the Russians retaliate against the Ottoman III Army whom they held responsible for the massacres.

On 11 July 1919, Damat Ferid Pasha officially confessed to massacres against the Armenians. The military court ruled that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians.
The Court Martial pronounced the death penalty against Talaat, Enver, Djemal, and Dr. Nazim.
Turkish military members and high-ranking politicians were convicted and transferred from Constantinople prisons to the Crown Colony of Malta, starting in 1919: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Decapitated heads of Armenians placed on stakes.

Armenians massacred in Aleppo after the 1918 Armistice in front of the Armenian Relief Hospital.

Last edited by Firestarter; 07-02-2017 at 10:33 AM.

Do NOT ever read my posts.
Google and Yahoo wouldn’t block them without a very good reason.

Here's a recent post on this topic by Goldenequity from another thread.

Originally Posted by goldenequity

The Armenian genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacres and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape and massacre.

Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups, such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks, were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide, and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy that targeted the Armenians. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.

In the eastern provinces, the Armenians were subject to the whims of their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors, who would regularly overtax them, subject them to brigandage and kidnapping, force them to convert to Islam, and otherwise exploit them without interference from central or local authorities.

Egged on by their Ottoman rulers, Kurdish tribal chieftains raped, murdered and pillaged their way through the southeastern provinces where for centuries they had co-existed, if uneasily, with the Armenians and other non-Muslims. Henry Morgenthau, who served as U.S. Ambassador in Constantinople at the height of the bloodshed, described the Kurds’ complicity in his chilling 1918 memoir Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story:

“The Kurds would sweep down from their mountain homes. Rushing up to the young girls, they would lift their veils and carry the pretty ones off to the hills. They would steal such children as pleased their fancy and mercilessly rob all the rest of the throng…While they were committing these depredations, the Kurds would freely massacre, and the screams of women and old men would add to the general horror.”

Do NOT ever read my posts.
Google and Yahoo wouldn’t block them without a very good reason.

I found another article that shows that my earlier posts about the reason for getting the Young Turks to rule over Turkey were too narrow minded.
It appears that the destruction of the huge Ottoman Empire was even more important, to make the Jewish state in Palestine possible.
Possibly it were even the Young Turks that jumpstarted WW I.

The B'nai B'rith is a tool of British intelligence to serve the interests of British imperial policy.
In 1876, the Young Ottomans briefly seized power in Constantinople. They were quickly overthrown, but not before ending a debt moratorium, paying off the British, declaring free trade, and bringing in Anglo-French bankers. The same network would return as the Young Turks.

Pan-Turkism was not created by the Young Turks or even in Turkey. It was first called for in the 1860s by the Hungarian Zionist named Arminius Vambery, who was an adviser to sultan Abdül Mecit, but was secretly working for Lord Palmerston and the British Foreign Office.
The plan was to bring all the Muslims of the world together into Turkey, whether or not they were Turkish. This idea was invented in the 1870s by the English nobleman, top British intelligence official, Wilfred Blunt, whose family had created the Bank of England.
It was obvious that the Russian Tsar wouldn’t cooperate. Blunt advocated using Islam to destroy Russia.

Alexander Helphand, better known as Parvus, moved to Turkey shortly after 1905, where he became the economics editor of “The Turkish Homeland”. Parvus later returned to Europe, and in 1917 arranged the secret train that took Lenin back to Russia.

According to Joseph Brewda, who wrote this interesting piece, the “novel” Greenmantle (1916) by John Buchan, is a good description of the Young Turks’ rise to power: https://archive.org/details/greenmantle00buchgoog
Carasso appears in the novel under his own name. Buchan, who was a British intelligence official in WW I, later identified the novel's hero as Aubrey Herbert. Herbert's grandfather had been a patron of Mazzini and died in 1848 leading revolutionary mobs in Italy. Herbert's father was in charge of British Masonry in the 1880s and 1890s. His uncle was the British ambassador to the United States.
During World War I, Aubrey Herbert was the top British spymaster in the Middle East. Lawrence of Arabia later identified Herbert as having been, at one time, the head of the Young Turks.
From 1890 through WW I, the 3 US ambassadors to Turkey played along in the ploy to destroy the Ottoman Empire and massacre the Christians: Oscar Straus, Abraham Elkin, and Henry Morgenthau. All 3 were friends of Simon Wolf and officials of B'nai B'rith.

In 1908, The Young Turks took power in Turkey.
Within 4 years, their anti-minority campaigns provoked the Balkan wars of 1912-13, among Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. By 1914, these wars triggered World War I, with Turkey as an ally of Germany.
When the Young Turks took power, the Ottoman Empire still included Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula, and much of the Balkans (half of Greece, half of Bulgaria, half of Serbia, and Albania).

By 1915, the Young Turks had destroyed the Ottoman Empire. British intelligence had also manipulated other nationalist groups in the Empire.
British intelligence supported: 1) Armenian nationalism; 2) Arab nationalism, led by Lawrence of Arabia; 3) Serbian nationalism, led by British agent Seton-Watson; 4) Albanian nationalism, led by Lady Dunham; 5) and Bulgarian nationalism, led by Noel Buxton. All of these groups wanted to break free from the Ottoman Empire.